Black labourer who became a surgeon dies

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From labourer to surgeon Hamilton Naki, an unsung pioneer of
transplant medicine.Photo: AP

Hamilton Naki, a labourer who became a self-taught surgeon of
such skill that Dr Christiaan Barnard chose him to help in the
world's first human heart transplant, has died. He was believed to
have been 78.

The 1967 transplant, at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town,
made medical history. It made Barnard, who was young, handsome -
and white, world famous. But Barnard only acknowledged Naki's work
in 1991, after the end of apartheid.

Barnard, in an interview shortly before dying in 2001, called
Naki "one of the great researchers of all time in the field of
heart transplants".

The cause of Naki's death on May 29 at his home near Cape Town,
was heart trouble, African and British newspapers said.

Naki, who left school at 14 and had no formal medical training,
spent five decades working at the University of Cape Town.
Originally hired as a gardener in about 1940, he acquired his
formidable surgical skills through years of silent observation and
covert practice at the university's medical school. He retired in
1991.

Although South Africa's apartheid laws forbade blacks from
performing surgery on whites, Naki's skills were so esteemed that
the university quietly looked the other way. He worked alongside
Barnard for decades as a lab technician, perfecting his craft and
assisting in many operations on people. Operating on animals, Naki
taught surgical techniques to generations of medical students.

During his years at the university, Naki lived on the outskirts
of Cape Town in a one-room shack without electricity or running
water. When he retired, he was paid a gardener's pension, far less
than a lab technician's.

In an interview in 2003, Naki expressed little bitterness about
a lifetime spent working in the shadows. "I was called one of the
backroom boys," he said. "They put the white people out front. If
people published pictures of me, they would have gone to jail."